Businesses: Raise your hand if you barely cared about Google+ until your SEO consultant called to say now you just have to. While the disproportionate weight Google is placing on + driven results may be unhealthy for SERPs in the short term, opening a relatively easy + door to bomb Google SERPs serves the function of enlisting SEOs to goad businesses into participating in Google’s fledgling social community.

Google’s strategy is brilliant, sort of like a sardonic dominatrix forcing her ambivalent quarry to capitulate with promises of immediate pleasure, ultimately resulting in long-term frustration for the poor S.O.B. that surrendered. Trust me, it won’t stay this easy to participate your way into SERPs via + as businesses flock to grab their share and mega authority profiles are grown by brand gorillas. Long term, true socialization will likely benefit SERPs. For now, one thing is sure: The SEO world is changing in radical ways. While (of course) we’d love you to hire a specialized consultant to counsel you on what to do next, here’s an awesome start without having to fork over mucho-sheckels. Read on as SEO industry pundits weigh in with gobs of actionable insights and tactics.

Google has tried to go social before. From the ill-conceived “Wave” to the “Buzz” debacle, they’ve failed  and gloriously to impel its throngs of users to take the leap to socialization in a Google environment. Conventional wisdom is that Google users don’t traffic Google to be social. At first, + was interesting but looked like it could be another ho-hum. That’s all changed now. SEOs like you and I are giddy lemmings, flocking and falling all over our feet, telling businesses that they too should participate in the land rush. Sadly, it’s true! “Calling all businesses! For the next 15 minutes Google organic prominence is easier than usual!”

Here are 32 totally free Google Plus Your World SEO Resources. From the greatest minds in the industry to niche trade pubs, have a gander:

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”, Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineLand
• Why Every Marketer Now Needs a Google+ Strategy, Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• Rank for Anything You Want on Google Search Plus Your World, Miranda Miller, Search Engine Watch
• When Search & Social Act Like Children, Users Lose, Lisa Barone, Outspoken Media
• Webmaster Reaction Towards Google Search, Plus Your World, Barry Schwartz, SearchEngineRoundTable
• Google Introduces ‘Search, Plus Your World’: Is Your Business Ready to Get Personal?, Jessica Bates, MasterGoogle
• How Google Search+ Your World Influences SEO Laurie Sullivan, MediaPost
• Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy, Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineLand
• What does Google’s social search mean for SEO? We ask the experts,  Nancy Messieh TNW Blog
• Twitter: Google+ Integration In Google Search Is “Bad” For Everyone, Matt McGee, Marketing Land
• Google+ for Business: 5 Things Marketing Professionals Should Know About Google+,  Ashley Zeckman TopRank, Online Marketing Blog
• What Google Personalized Search plus Your World Means for Marketing – SEO Tips, Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing Blog
• How Google Search Plus Your World Affects SEO, Sean, SEOHacker
• 5 Ways Google Search Plus Your World Impacts SEO, Jacob Stoops, Agent
• SEOGoogle’s “Search Plus Your World” Gets Personal, SEOHaus
• Google+ SEO AJ Kohn, Blind Five Year Old
• How Google Search Plus Your World Will Impact SEO, Marcus Taylor, SEOOptimise
• How Does Google’s Search Plus Your World Impact Adwords and Other Forms of Online Marketing?, Joe Mangum, SEOmoz
• How To Rank On Page One Of Google’s Personalized Search, SEO Philosophy5
• §  Harsh Truths About Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ Update, Obaidul Haque, SearchEngine Marketing Group
• Google Search, Plus Your World: Where Google Plus and SEO Converge, Jannette Pazer, Dragon Search
• Search Plus Your World: Google’s SEO Game Changer, Stephanie Cain, The Right Click
• ‘Google Search, Plus Your World’ – An SEO’s Perspective, Mike, Digital Marketing Blog
• Google+ for SEO? Don’t Focus on Your Brand Page!, Eric Wittlake, B2C
• Building Authority and Influence in Google, Kaiserthesage
• Three Reasons Google Search Plus Your World Will Change Your World, Vocus Blog
• Google Rocks SEO With Search Plus Your World, OptimizeThis
• Get Yourself Featured in New Google Search Plus Your World Personalized Search, Mark Traphagen, Virante Orange Juice
• Google ‘Search Plus Your World’ Brings Google+ Into Search Results, Michael Liedtke, HuffingtonPost

Additional Resources, Added “Post” Humously

• 30 Hands On Google Search Plus SEO Techniques for Getting Personal, Tadeusz Szewczyk, OnReact
• eBook from our friends at SearchInfluence, Using Google Plus For Business

The second day of #SESCHI is in full swing, and the Panda vs. Human: Advanced eCommerce SEO & UX, featuring speakers Greg Nudelman, CTO of Design Caffeine and author of Designing Search (@DesignCaffeine) Inc and Jaimie Sirovich, CTO of SEO Egghead Inc (@SEOEgghead) tackled some seriously deep tactics for pleasing the Panda without compromising user experience.

Greg and Jaimie tag-teamed the session discussing how what is good for Panda can be good for people… but not always. Panda is your visitor, too, and these guys consider that furry black and white critter an important demographic. Read on for the tasty takeaways.

Sliders: the Usability Challenge

The User Side
You can pop them on the page & they look good… or do they? Often, a drill-down or box-select work better for user experience and the Panda. Sliders fail when trying to find things around the range.

Sliders create ineffective system states. For most people, 1-2 stars are pretty darn useless (eg: Hotel reviews) most users don’t even want to go there.

Where there is a large range of price with consumers looking at a tight budget, the user experience is poor, as the range buttons are right on top of each other and users cannot easily identify how many option they have within that range.

Prisjakt, a Swedish eCommerce site, is implementing something new: a histogram + slider! Leave it to the Sweeds to come up with something really cool.

The really big elephant in the room: accessibility.

Colorblindness is something marketers must keep in mind. Some fancy interactivity may have issues.

The Panda Side:
Do nothing, see nothing. Sometimes this is best because some data is not useful (price). Instead create a hierarchy of values based on string prefixes, numerical ranges, etc.

• Does not for work for “true” Aristotelian trees
• These are often tested at Wal-Mart (and they go between switching them on & off quickly)
• Jaimie has implemented a tweaked version

When it comes to making a decision: K.I.S.S.  …!
Incorporating all the solutions is like shooting yourself in the foot. When users can see the inventory within the ranges it’s quite powerful.

Facet-Enabled-Landing Pages: Where’s the Beef?

User Considerations:
It can be difficult when users cannot quickly find products on landing pages which creates a poor user experience.

Take for example a “Harry Potter” search on Amazon. Amazon has all products, then there’s a tile of lists, which users really like.

Considering the Panda:
Pandas like to see real content (a LOT). Solution: do both, products and content.

Create facet-enabled (FE) landing page:

• Add content at the top for Pandas and humans
• Not just categories, for categories + facet-filters
  • Eg: “material: leather” + sofas

A few eCommerce platforms (adeptCommerce, Endeca etc) support FE landing pages out of the box. These are really important for PPC and SEO.

Tangent: Don’t make me think DRILL.

• Modern FE design leads to shallower less-detailed/deep category tree.

Often, this forces users to make ambiguous and or frustrating subcategory decisions. Humans love facet categories, but they’re very bad for robots and Panda.

Now, many subcategories are turned into facets and facets used for details in any application order and combo are a huge spider trap and bad for Panda.

Superfluous Content (Not really duplicate content, but almost…)

Useless content consists of unique questions that no one cares about (yes, Virginia), there ARE stupid questions. Eg:  search: “cameras & red or blue” vs. “cameras in red” … or “cameras in blue”

Why is this a problem? Humans have intent: “I want a blue shirt,” and many URL parameters are useless to pandas, just as some are also useless to humans.

Google’s New Parameter Tool
New addition to Web Master Tools:

• Indicate to WM which URL parameters filter content
• Still does not indicate which are more useful
  • What about facets that used to be subcategories
  • Does not work if you’re an avid re-writer

Same Content, Multiple Access Points
Problems:

• Duplicate controls
• No way to be sure you’ve found everything
• Confusing and unsatisfying if you are trying to repeat the same search task.

The URLs are also different, though the product set is the same, which makes Panda sad, and makes for a poor user experience when trying to recreate a search.

Panda and humans agree: Too many ways to get to the same thing is confusing for people & pandas. It truly is duplicate content.

Rel=Canonical is Not Your Solution
Panda does not appreciate thin repetitive content, and though some may think so, Rel=Canonical is not your SEO messiah.

Eg:

red+15mp+sony

vs.

15mp+sony+red

vs.

sony+15mp+red

It’s probably not a good idea to leave it up to Google to figure out these different URL strings.

Good Solutions: Present states for selections in a consistent order within a pages URL, this eliminates really ugly spider traps.

• Eliminate the number of selections
• Exclude multiple-disjunctive-select URLS
• Whitelist exceptions (especially landing pages with added content)

But, really, is this anything new? Nope.

This is the same SEO your mom did. SEOs have done this since hotbot & altavista etc.

[editors note: not really my mom]

Bad Solutions:

• Hide everything ( you’ll miss out on long-tail traffic)
• Keep spiders out
• Just use AJAX
• AJAX does not create index-able pages
• Same problem
• #! might work/help, but will not save you

Variation on Same Idea:

• Selective robots.tx
• Selectively include faceted pages

Why Not Use Keyword Search Pages?

• Search doesn’t allow for easy exploration, because there are no sibling values
• Noise: polysemy is a problem
• Google (officially) frowns upon this
• Less clear when adding content/value. (But why chance it?)

Facets: Single or Multi-Select

For Users:
We used to unconditionally recommend single-select/drill down, now, multi-select pretty much rulez. Caveat: you really must know what you’re doing.

Decide if you’re going to stick with drill down or parallel selection. Provide an obvious and consistent way to undo selections. Lastly, always make ALL filters easily accessible.

What about Panda?
Multi-select & SEO is even worse than single-select “standard” facet. Remove and get rid of it. On very large sites with multi-select the silly combo-space is even larger. Robots are fast, but cannot index terabytes of data.

Watch Your Logs! (Not just analytics)

• Don’t be an armchair SEO (theorizing all day)
• This is not in your analytics
• It’s very easy to miss spider traps
• You must look at your logs
• You’ll find stuff you missed (trust me)

But… Search & Navigation is SO COMPLICATED! Why not use SaaS search?

Not so fast!

SaaS isn’t so SaaSy sometimes:

• Only works off search box
• If users lands on a category page, no advanced navigation
• They must restart from search box
• Content on subdomain

Be careful.

Certain vendors have solutions:

• adeptCommerce Hosted Search platform (in Beta) has solved this
• Category pages with grafted in facet filters
• Content should not live on a subdomain (you really don’t want this)
• Searchspring has a solution for this as well

NEW: Facet-Enabled Breadcrumbs

For Users:
Browse & search work in tandem on the best sites. Integrated facet-breadcrumbs (IFB):

• Integrates facets into breadcrumb
• Maintains hierarchical order
• Labels breadcrumb aspects (this is essential if users are coming from search space eg: Google)
• Direct keyword manipulation
• Makes pivoting easy

MAYA: most advanced yet acceptable

Faceted-breadcrumbs hold the promise to become the key component in the next-gen of intuitive finding interfaces that fully integrate the best of faceted search and browser capabilities.

Panda Views:
Pandemonium!

If you want to implement IFB or similar, you must think about Panda:

• Unless care is taken this will now create a new spider trap on all pages
• Once again, rel=canonical will not work
• Jr.com implements session based

Grand Takeaways!

• Pandas and humans do agree on a few things
• When they disagree, pay attention!
• Don’t forget user experience for humans AND pandas
• Panda does require some consideration as a “demographic”

Big thanks to the speakers for an amazing session. Stay tuned to @merrymorud @ericasendros and @meganlichty for more live coverage from #SESCHI, and keep a finger on the pulse of aimClear blog for more posts from the event!

photo credit: danielfoster
photo credit: cjseven
photo credit: goldberg
photo credit: basykes
photo credit: booleansplit
photo credit: pinkstockphotos
photo credit: wwwpgflickrcom

Welcome back to aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East! It was the rank spank heard round the world: Google Panda, an algorithm update by-and-large focused on quality content, rolled out in waves starting February 24, 2011. Panda thematically dominated SMX Advanced back in June, and by proxy, the Best of SMX Advanced Track this go-round at East. The morning kicked off with Google Survival Tips and lead into the afternoon with inspirational and informative techniques for Panda-Proofing Your Content.

Moderator Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land, Q&A moderator John Doherty, SEO Consultant, Distilled, and speakers Horst Joepen, CEO, Searchmetrics, Heather Lloyd-Martin, President and CEO, SuccessWorks Search Marketing, and Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance took turns sharing actionable advice for creating top-quality content designed to satisfy users, rank well in search engines, and of course, please the Panda. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Takeaways live after the jump.

Chris Sherman took the stage and welcomed the crowd. He raised a noteworthy statistic addressed earlier int he day, namely: Google claims only 12% of websites were affected by Panda. While that doesn’t sound like a ton, consider how many sites and pages are indexed by Google. Twelve percent of a trillion is pretty darn sizable, don’t you think?

Regarding Panda, Google has always said quality content is important. But there’s also technical aspects to consider when optimizing for the algorithm. While Panda has some site owners screaming bloody murder, it also presents a (perhaps previously overlooked) opportunity for them to seriously rework their content so it works to their advantage.

Heather was up first. She began by stressing that we are all content marketers. Websites are composed of content. If you own a website, you’re marketing it. Therefore: website owners are content marketers.

“Some see Panda as a slap,” Heather noted, “but it’s about emphasizing quality content… something we should have been doing all along.”

Pre-panda, folks focused on search engines and forgot about readers. That’s a serious shame! The war-cry was always, “Create content for the search engines!” Thing is… search engines don’t pay your bills. customers do.

“Make sure every word you write is focused on what your users want to read,” Heather stressed.

We all know what quality content is by being able to look at it, being able to paraphrase. In fact, here’s a paraphrased quote from Potter Stewart Heather shared with the crowd:

“Quality content is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.”

(Author’s note / question to the reader: Was I actually supposed to put quotes around that?)

Heather went on to comically lament, “At no other time in history did people create such crappy content everywhere and expect good results.”

As content marketers, we want to create quality content, but we don’t know how to start. Here’s Heather’s tip: View your content as parts of a whole.

Heather’s Guide to Panda-Proofed Content

• Create an editorial calendar that makes it easy to slice & dice your content & repurpose it for different mediums.
  • Quality content allows you to do this easily.
  • Crap content is like buying a cheap shirt you will wear for one season, then toss.
• Stop asking, “What does Google want?”
  • Focus on what your customers want, on what they’re interested in reading.
• Develop content around keyphrase research, customer questions, sales funnels, and stories you can tell about your company.
• Strategically repurpose content across different mediums.
  • From whitepapers, make blog posts, tweet stats that point to whitepaper, post facts on FB page, put in newsletter, etc.
  • From blog posts, make videos, share links on FB and LinkedIn, Twitter, start discussions, etc.
  • From sales pages and case studies, integrate video testimonials, tweet facts, link back, etc.
• Important: Keep track of your content assets with an editorial calendar. Stick to it! On-the-fly is no good.

Action Steps – What You Can Do Now, Yes, Now!

1. Evaluate your current content assets. What do you have? What have you done?
2. Get everyone on the same page about SEO content. This could be a fast chat, or an in-house training.
3. After researching topics, create your editorial calendar. Assign monthly content to in-house team, or outsource.
4. Watchdog the quality. Even post-Panda, some folks are confused about how to approach SEO writing. The content may not pass the test.
5. Have fun with content development. This is your chance to tell a story about your company and convert like crazy .

Heather wrapped up and turned it over to Horst, who was going to discuss more of an international perspective – on what our friend Panda did in other countries.

Looking at the history of reported or noted penalties and updates…

• 2006 – BMW goes black hat
• 2009 – The Vince & Canonical update
• 2010 – MayDay Update (May), Brand Update (August)
• 2011 – Panda hits U.S. (February), more U.S. & International affected (April), Pan-English (August)

What makes the difference? Why do some sites get penalized, others, not? With Panda, it was more of an auto-penalty or auto-quality rating. Previously, things were more of an analytics-supported (manual) quality rating and time limited penalties. Now, however, there’s a greater emphasis on permanent quality assessment during crawling / indexing, permanent pressure on KW positions, etc.

Early-Warning Signs: Do They Exist? What Are They?

• Quality content is necessary. What do search engines do with the rearrangement of rankings and the redirecting of traffic?
• Example: idealo.de vs. idealo.fr. No change in traffic for the German site. For the French site, there was a 39% loss of visibility. Conclusion: Brand protection goes a long way.
• Excessive linkbuilding example – the JCPenny rollercoaster. Why the hell did they do that? Lesson: Learn from your competition. Watch for penalties in your peer groups.
• Reasons for penalties will be built into Panda and algorithm improvements. Warning signs (instances of sites getting spanked) indicate what might hit you later.

When Examining Peers / Competitors, Look For…

• Which competitor got away?
• Who got hit, and why?
• Compare buckling structures, content and structure of competitor domains
• Compare AdSense and affiliate load (less is better!)
• Compare social network activities
• Compare user experience

SEO 2.0 Winning Traits

• Sites with original content, but not always the original wins
• Brands and established businesses are preferred

So you got spanked…

• Adjust SEO strategy
• Go long tail, don’t stand in between
• In the short term, compensate with PPC traffic or other universal channels
• Distribute content on subdomains
• Worst case, relaunch

Key Takeaways:

• The line has been moved up towards quality
• Leverage peer group monitoring to learn from others
• Don’t stand back, don’t go overkill– walk the line!

Last but not least was Chris Silver Smith.

“What is Panda?” Chris mused.

Vanessa Fox says it isn’t simply an algorithm update. It is a platform for new ways to understand the web and user experience. Danny Sullivan, similarly, says it’s not a new algorithm, it’s a new factor. Stephan Weitz and Maile Oyhe maintain Panda makes it easier to reliably detect social spam. Chris believe it’s a combination of automated metrics and human factors-  a method for modeling webpages and websites that have certain usage profile combinations scoring those combos then using scores to rank pages.

Usability and user experience have become more influential in ranking determinations. Have we seen an earlier incarnation? It seemed familiar to Chris. In the past, Google has gone after “thin affiliates,” and penalized them from ranking.

Quality Evaluator Tips, & Other Things to Consider

• Check out how your page looks in the search results. Is it what the user making the search query would want to see?
• Human factors with an impact: Clicks for SERPs, bounce rate, time on site, linking behavior, social media- shares / mentions / votes.
• Leverage a paid human evaluator staff, algorithmic analytics, and application of factor values.

Tips from Chris

• Remove/noindex pages of low quality or oath (remove error pages, aptly vestigial pages)
• Site: search for error pages, check server status codes for error pages
• Combine similar pages, redirect one to the other (KW term variation pages targeted by panda)
• Include more value-add features on your pages. relevant images, videos, maps, related links, charts
• Coordinate strong social media & pr campaigns if this is post relaunch, change usage profile model, improve it when it is next assessed by panda
• Don’t force users to click secondary pages to view vital info
• X testing – focus groups, usability testing follow clickstreams, personas
• Clean out spam from comments and gourds
• Use rel=author tagging for customer trust in pages
• Does article have spelling /s stylistic or factual errors? clean and fix
• Remove excessive ads that interfere with user access of content
• Become an authoritative source (links for Wikipedia)
• Publish a book about your business
• Avoid over-optimizations

—

Big thanks to the speakers for some awesome tips on pleasing the Panda and creating quality content. Stick around aimClear blog for more coverage from #SMX East 2011.

Photo credit: Nak Datta

Chris Sherman: Is Google making us smarter, or dumber?

Steven Levy: It’s beside the point. Technology changes us. It’s about us adapting to the technology. Google makes it easier to get by if you’re dumb, though.

Marc Rotenberg: Teachers/Parents freaked out about Wikipedia – but it was interactive, so if something was wrong, you change it. Search engines are essentially the same.

Jeff Jarvis: We ARE smarter. We are more fact-based. Now, if you want a fact, you see it in .2 seconds, opposed to going to the library.

Sherman: Think about the gas you’re not using by NOT having to drive to the library. In regards to privacy, Google is doing similar things as Facebook. There is a difference between gathering data and using that data: what’s your take? IS Google a good steward of our data?

Rotenberg: There should be a high legal standard. The government shouldn’t be able to just go to Google and get whatever info they want. We (EPIC) don’t think the government should be setting privacy standards. We’ve looked into the relationship between Google and NSA which they could “neither confirm nor deny.”

Levy: Gmail was a turning point in Google and privacy. The Internet makes a lot of things available/accessible & Google is the instrument. If you Google yourself & a DUI comes up in the first 10 results, that’s like someone putting something on your resume. (ouch) General users can’t do much about it, unless you’re an SEO specializing in reputation management. Google should take more ownership of that problem. There is no solution to that. But Google should take ownership. That’s the core privacy problem with Google. For Facebook, it’s different. Facebook encourages you to put info there to be more accessible.

Rotenberg: Quick note: individuals in Spain have ordered Google to take some personal information down which is still in progress.

Jarvis: I want to re-cast this discussion: There’s a notion of “public-ness.” Essentially there’s a Guttenberg press in everyone’s hand. We see this benefit the unrest in the Arab nations with social media. People have the notion of the “right to be forgotten” – do you tell a newspaper to take something out of the archives? Do you tell me to forget a memory? I think we have to start here with what people are doing. There are 750 million people on Facebook – willingly, sharing and posting. If you’re able to take down searches earlier, we wouldn’t be able to track the Flu or other epidemics which has great value. We should tread very carefully in saying what should be public.

Sherman: Google provides very sophisticated tools. Google is being proactive (giving people control over their data), but are they doing enough?

Jarvis: Well, I talk about you on my website. You would call that your data, but it’s not, it’s mine.

Sherman: What about actual tools e.g. deleting emails/exporting?

Levy: I think Internet companies do more than most. There are full-time employees whose job is privacy. I take issue with Double Click in AdSense for the “benefit” of relative ads. You may get a better ad, in exchange for Google’s servers gather data. I think if more people knew about that trade off they may prefer to see a less relevant ad.

Rotenberg: I am becoming more of a skeptic. When it comes to privacy with Google & Facebook nothing is stable.

Sherman: Google has acquired the technology for facial recognition (Google Goggles) Facebook did this too, will this be part of a day to day?

Rotenberg: Google Goggles would cross the creepy line, while Facebook has embraced this.

Levy: Google Goggles – they didn’t think it’d be a problem (in development), but the perception of the problem was there & they didn’t go for it. Google is happy Facebook did it first instead.

Jarvis: Facebook has recently added new controls similar to Google+. Now photos that are tagged must be approved. You can now choose who to share updates, photos, etc with. This gives us more control than anywhere else on the Internet. Facial recognition can be good, for example, they used it in the UK to identify terrorists before they get to the gate.

Rotenberg: But they used facial recognition in the UK to identify political protesters…

Jarvis: The technology is neutral, how we use it can either be good or bad. We should not assume it’s bad, and thus ban it and lose what can be good.

Rotenberg: We must have a discussion about who’s using this technology and to what purpose.

Levy: What about Street View?  The simple idea of showing a public street seems to us an invasion of privacy. We think about it in the negative case: such as burglars casing a house they may not have seen.

Rotenberg: What if a large French company using cars to photograph streets and use that information? We wouldn’t perceive that as OK.

Jarvis: It’s a matter of principle. They called Google street view a violation – I view this as: it’s from a public street, and a public view. If you tell Google they can’t take a picture of a public place from a public space, are you going to tell a journalist they can’t too?

Levy: Look at the bigger picture – view it as the capability of the Internet to have a huge archive. If it wasn’t Google, there’d be another company.

Sherman: Shift from privacy, let’s talk about legal issues. Which is most important? What are the risks?

Levy: It’s already changed how we use Google. They’re focused with how they do algorithms. It’s serious stuff & you have to take your hat off to Microsoft & AT&T for bringing the legal concerns up. Google has to take it very seriously. They’re sending Eric Schmidt to congress next week. I think that there are important issues that the SEO community deals with every day with the anti-trust thing. What right does Google have to set its algorithms? A judge said it’s a protected opinion – like movie reviews. That opinion however is under attack because Google is perceived to have too much market power.

Rotenberg: I think there’s a lot on Google’s plate when it comes to legal issues. The Washington office is growing to no surprise. But take a step back, what is Google worried about? Monopoly & anti-trust issues because Google dominates so much across the board. That’s the difficult problem. It’s hard to escape their success.

Jarvis: We love success then fear success. Google becomes aware later of the problem of this. It’s portrayed as Godzilla & they perceive themselves as Snuffleupagus. If Google comes to a company & says they’re violating rules of spamming & they say “No, we’re a directory.” in this case Google has the power of god to wipe the company out of the SERPs. But there’s always an alternative.

Levy: There was a time when Google was down and the traffic for yahoo shot straight up. If Google uses the power of god, takes away a search result too often, people will go to competitors.

Sherman: This concept, search neutrality, looking at Google, there’s no yard stick from the personalization.

Jarvis: That kills the SEO industry because you can’t prove the lift/ROI. But this goes back to privacy: they’re trying to have users to generate signals.

Rotenberg: Coming back to the organization of search – we filed a new complaint to FTC which looked at the changes in the search algorithm pre-Google acquisition of YouTube and post acquisition of YouTube. We look at the default ranking factors of YouTube before acquisition which were: hits, then user rankings (stars), then relevance. So, there’s two objective metrics then a subjective. Post acquisition, relevance became the default. This is internal proprietary measure is subjective. For example, post the change, if you did a search for “privacy” five of the top ten are generated by Google. Before EPIC ranked in the top four. That use of search algorithms can bias public access.

Jarvis: But pre-acquisition YouTube search SUCKED. You can only guess at the motives.

Levy: I wouldn’t be shocked to learn, the company that values relevance so highly, made it the primary factor. It could also just be their algorithms.

Rotenberg: But it’s their algorithm.

Jarvis: This is conspiracy theory here.

Levy: Isn’t this interesting that Google’s privacy stuff comes up. So if we suspect something is up, do we have the right to demand seeing Google’s algorithms? That’s a big question.

Rotenberg: We were a competitor in this space and all our stuff just dropped.

Sherman: With Larry coming back as CEO – Google has killed more products in the last month. Is Google changing direction? Or Larry re-asserting control?

Levy: Not a new direction, but trying to get back to more original direction. It’s a mixed bag of stuff they discontinued in their spring cleaning. Larry wants a coherent strategy and new products, but is trimming the fat. Google can’t operate as a clunky bureaucracy.

Jarvis: Question for you, Levy, I’m curious about innovation inside and outside. On the inside there was WAVE, you spend time on that and it’s gone.

Levy: For certain projects, Google is still a welcoming company of innovation. I think through history you see the risk of acquisitions. Google’s unique – they made great acquisitions like YouTube, Android and DoubleClick. YouTube hasn’t been profitable, but what would you rather have? Groupon or YouTube?

Rotenberg: What about Zagats?

Levy: They tried to use reviews from Yelp and went too far and got spanked for that. It was Marissa’s mobile group who bought Zagats. The challenge will be to keep up the user participation & the culture of Zagat. It fits very, very neatly into Google’s operation.

Jarvis: They view Zagats as a platform, not a content company. The problem you come back to is favoring their own content. So if they treat it like content, it’s danger-danger, but they see it as a platform. Content, would affect their ability to be neutral and fair.

Sherman: A huge initiative is Google+: people call it a mash-up of Facebook and Twitter. Will this go the way of Orkut, Buzz or WAVE?

Rotenberg: If you want search it’s Google, for social it’s Facebook.

Jarvis: I don’t know that Google+ is a social network. I think Facebook is about relationships. Twitter is for broadcasting. Google+ is about sharing. Though, I think people interpret it differently. I was seeing the wall as a place to publish, however my son saw it as having conversations in new and different ways. Just in the use of it: twitter is fundamentally different about being more live. But I get better, deeper conversations on Google+ than on my blog. They also don’t attract as many trolls. Broadcast + conversation + social = Google+

THE INTERNET IS THE SOCIAL NETWORK.

Levy: First, Google+ is not a Facebook killer and they don’t think they’re going to knock off Facebook. They just want to be a part of the equation. Google+ wants to be more real-time, for example, video hangouts. Second, people were unhappy with how Facebook made them share. Third, we haven’t really seen what Google+ really is. We’re on the front-end of Google being more social.

Rotenberg: It’s like an operating system for the internet. Is that where Google would like to take this?

Levy: We just haven’t seen the full integration.

Sherman: Favorite Google anecdote?

Levy: One day in October 2009 – Google does this thing: Google Product Strategy. It’s a big meeting every week, top executives are there… these people from different groups come and show new products. I sat in on a couple. On this day: it was the YouTube team. They showed numbers that he cannot talk about. It was a very Men In Black memory eraser moment. The thing before me was Google video. A new product. And the thing after was Google Goggles. Before the meeting began, Eric came in and had just steamed a CBS tennis match and was really excited about it. He told the YouTube team and that’s part of the reason why YouTube is doing more streaming.

Rotenberg: As busy as we are raising concerns, some of my closest friends work there. At a personal level, I have enormous respect for abilities and achievements. From the Washington point of view, we need to take a step back and ask hard questions.

Jarvis: My book was different than Levy’s. I didn’t want to sign the NDA at the door. I was using Google as a foil of the changing world. I did a talk at Google and there are rocket scientists there, telling me how full of shit I was. Google is a place that defaults to SMART. When the default in so many companies feels like stupid.

Rotenberg: Google’s Achilles heel is its hubris. Google said: don’t be evil – really they meant, don’t be Microsoft. With Microsoft it was about arrogance. Google has tobe careful about over-extending.

Sherman: In five years, what will we be talking about?

Levy: How to get back from space in the Google spaceship?

Rotenberg: Who’s going to be running YouTube? And search?

Jarvis: I think ubiquity of connectivity is going to have a change in society that’s bigger than Google itself. The internet of things, things connected all over. But, Google is not invincible.

Sherman: Is Google’s biggest risk competition? Or doing something internally?

Rotenberg: That’s a great question. Its greatest adversary is itself.

Levy: Agree. In dealing with its size & trying to not be bureaucratic.

— Thanks to the panelists for a fabulous discussion. Stay tuned at aimClear blog for more #SMX East 2011 coverage .

Photo credit: CreativeCommons

aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East 2011 kicked off with… PANDA WATCH! How else?

Largely due to this sweeping smackdown, Panda has been a hot topic at online marketing conferences this year. Google estimates the algo’ update has affected a mere 12% of all websites, but how many of them truly deserved the ranking-spanking?

On the morning of #SMX East Day 1, moderator Matt McGee, Q&A moderator Chris Silver Smith, and speakers Alan Bleiweiss, Director of Search Services, Click2Rank Consulting, Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Senior SEO Manager, Become, Inc, & Mark Munroe, Senior Director, SEO, Everyday Health, came together to share insightful two cents and survival tips for overcoming Panda’s wrath and staking your claim in the search engine result pages (SERPs) once more. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Read on for the full guide.

Matt McGee took the mic, welcomed attendees, sussed the level of sleepiness and sobriety, introduced the speakers, and kicked off the session. On the menu, Google’s Panda, the infamous algorithm update that hit Feb 24, 2011, and recovery tips for those spanked, clobbered, annihilated, i.e.: affected.

Mark Munroe was up first. He began with various site traffic charts that showcased the decrease in traffic some sites suffered during the first wave of Panda (by comparison of the roll out of the MayDay algo update). For some sites, the decrease attributed to Panda was a fiery crash and burn. Stock-market style.

Conclusion according to Mark: The Panda update is the most significant change to the organic search also since the intro of Page Rank and link reputation.

Follow Up Conclusion: Whether or not you were hit by Panda, it is vital to learn from what’s going on, and prepare yourself for the next wave. Some folks weren’t hit by Panda, and got cocky. You better believe they got spanked during the second wave.

General Sites That Got Hit:

• Q&A sites
• Sites about everything (eHow.com, for example)
• Content farms
• Directories

Pre-Panda
In pre-Panda Google, search relevancy was defined by content, links, and anchor text. Site reputation and page importance were determined by linking structure of the Internet. Pre-Panda SEO strategies and SEO objectives focused on ways to create new content and new pages, e.g. search result pages, tag pages, data driven pages, or variations of same page optimized for different keywords. Even if users were less targeted, site owners still made money based on some conversions and ad clicks.

In Google’s eyes, pre-Panda days made it too easy to manipulate the SERPs without respect to quality.

Post-Panda
SERP positions are now modified based on new reputation factor, a quality assessment of site as whole. Mark hypothesized that reputation is based primarily on user metrics, i.e. on how the user interacts with your site in the SERP.

“Google know more than you do!” –Mark Munroe

Truth – when it comes to the SERP user experience (XP), Google knows more about the user experience of an SEO visit to your site than you do.

That said, what do you know?

• Conversions
• Bounce rates
• Two-page visits
• Three-page visits

What do those user actions mean about user satisfaction?
It’s not easy to glean a whole lot. If a user searches for android app reviews, clicks on “topandroid.com,” goes through to site, finds no reviews, clicks back to the SERP to find a good site, this tells Google that the topandroid.com site was not useful.

What Interests Google?
Think like a Google product manager. What do they care about? They care about Google SERPs – their effectiveness and organization. They care about the way the user interacts with the SERP.

It’s likely that Google does not get its data from Google Analytics or the Google Toolbar. They likely focus more on metrics like:

• G-Bounce, a.k.a. if someone clicks on a link from the SERP and bounces immediately back to the SERP
• Query behavior after the G-Bounce
• Average time before the G-Bounce
• CTR
• Repeat visits

…and similar metrics that are not be reported by your analytics package.

Ranking Spanking Recovery Plan, Tips & Tactics:

• Fix the pages that drive you traffic.
• Addressing the issue on pages that address only a small part of traffic will not have a large impact on overall metrics.
• Integrate SEOs and User XP engineers – make sure your SEOs are thinking about user XP, and make sure your designers are thinking about search.
• Define, implement, and report on good metrics that correlate to the search XP.
• Analyze the impact of each new release on the search XP.
• Beware of and give close scrutiny to type of content and techniques that have specifically led to Panda issues.
• Remember the user XP starts on the SERP, and starts with a KW.
• Leverage survey polls to get a deeper understanding of who is ending up on your landing page.
• Survey people who are representatives of your overall traffic. Only survey the ones coming from Google (because that’s the traffic source you’re testing!). Your homepage users and your incoming-from-Google users are very different users.
• Do actual user testing to get a sense of usability – but make sure to start on the SERP, not on your website. (Check out usertesting.com, Mark recommends- it’s cheap, effective, and spits back answers within hours.)
• Use KWs from your analytics package that are representative of your traffic.
• Create scenarios that test the key Qs people have when they come to your site (based on your surveys). Do people find what they’re looking for? Are ads in the way? Do people know what they’re supposed to do?
• Look for bad KWs. Do you see KWs that don’t make sense? Fix them, or change the content that causes them to show up.
• Make sure the content relevant to the search query that brought a user to a site is easy to find.
• Beware of content hidden behind read more buttons, tabs, etc.
• If you allow comments & UGC, get sophisticated spam filtering implemented. Spammers are good at bringing in unwanted traffic.
• Make sure you have good titles! SEO 101. That’s just plain smart.
• Beware of having content for content’s sake – content should be very tightly focused on the title of a page.
• De-index content that does not deliver, e.g. Q&A pages without answers, dynamically generated pages with little to no content, etc.
• Use no-index / no-follow on these pages, but be careful to test to make sure it doesn’t go on the wrong pages.
• Link freely to relevant content – if you cant give users what they want, show them where they can find it.
• Don’t annoy your users with too many ads, slow load time, or anything that will make people bounce quickly.
• Don’t ever have downtime. If you do, create a lovely-looking maintenance page so a user knows what’s up.
• Give a good mobile experience. Some sites are seeing 15-20% of traffic coming form Google. Make sure your mobile site makes for a good UX.
• Be mindful about the validity of your metrics – standard bounce rates as reported by most analytics packages is extremely flawed, says Mark. Likewise with time on site, as it doesn’t factor in bounces. Bounce rate based on time instead of single page view – 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, true time on site, etc.
• Industry specific concerns – Certain types of were royally spanked by Panda (shopping sites, for example). If you’re in one of these verticals, you’ve just got to work extra hard to create a solid UX, to help users get to their ultimate destinations.

Mark summed up by noting Panda is a quality assessment of your site, most likely based on data of how user interacts with SERPs.

There you have it. Next up was Alan Bleiweiss. In case you didn’t know, Alan is a sorcerer. He must be – how else could he have brought back sites from the dead after mondo-Panda-spankings?

Ah, yes. Perhaps he’s just a great SEO.

Alan performed a 17 site audits that compiled the data in his presentation. The 17 sites amounted to approximately 43 million pages indexed by Google. Of those 43 mil, only 10 million were indexed in Bing. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Right off the bat, Alan emphasized the importance of attracting activity and traffic from a lot of sources other than Google.

Myopic SEO vs. Sustainable SEO
Alan toured us through two approaches to SEO, one he calls “myopic” and the other, “sustainable.”

• Myopic SEO = The magic bullet theory. “If I focus on this single type of work, I will succeed!” Not exactly realistic, or responsible. Myopic SEO can be caused by or lead to topical confusion, not enough text, internal link poisoning, unnatural off-site patterns, and similar factors.
• Sustainable SEO = Focuses on user XP as seen through the eyes of search bots & algorithms. Sustainable SEO can be characterized by consistent signals on topical focus, confirming focus, not overwhelming senses, and off-site diversity. Sustainable SEO usability factors include section specific sub-nav, microdata breadcrumbs, high quality topic focused unique content, main content area.

As if we had any doubts, Alan showed some graphs from his case studies, comparing the results of Panda as felt by sites that took a myopic approach to SEO vs. a sustainable one. The sites with sustainable SEO were on a noticeable road to recovery. The myopic SEO sites, not so much.

Spread Your SEO Wings!
Spread out your focus and your efforts. SEO needs to be a broad range of techniques, and tactics. Really take time to put yourself in your users’ shoes. Examine your page. Is it overwhelming? Is it enough? If users have a problem with your site, you can pretty much guarantee that under certain circumstances, Google will, too.

A Word About AdSense…
If you are a real person or a real company that offers real services, don’t have AdSense ads on your site. Just don’t do it. It’s gross. And unnecessary!

Inbound Links
If you want powerful results from the search engines and a sustainable user experience, spread out how you communicate what you’re offering. One way to do this is through diverse and optimized anchor text, and beefing up your inbound link profile. The more domains you have sending inbound links to you, the lower your link to root ratio is. Your overall link to root ratio show more sites sending fewer links to same site. It is natural (and good) to have a low link to root ratio, as this helps tell the search engine you have a diverse source of inbound links.

Be Kind to Bing
If you’re taking the time to submit your sitemap to Google, go the extra step and submit to Bing. Lest we forget, Bing does drive traffic. That said, Alan notes it has a hard time finding content on its own, so submitting a sitemap can be extra helpful. A lot of site owners neglect this small but super smart tactic. Don’t be one of them.

Things Bing Loves

• Diversity in inbound links
• Really tight correlation between anchors and relevant pages
• Social (but that doesn’t mean you should settle for having a social presence. Become a social authority!)

Alan next hit some insightful points on the future-thinking:

• Sustainable SEO cares about the future. Always consider, what will users be doing six months from now? A year form now?
• What Myopic SEO techniques is Matt Cutt’s next target?
• What are the biggest emerging tech trends?
• Next big thing: Social! (For Google and Bing… from+1 for websites to authority tweeters and everything in between

Let’s talk about Schema.org.
What does it mean? Schema.org means more diversity of deep information – of events, products, locations, and people profiles.

“Schema.org is definitely going to be a ranking factor in 2012,”Alan stressed. “Take the next 6 months to learn about it, to get on board, and to use it.”

Powerful and smart! Last but not least, Micah Fisher-Kirshner. He laid out 11 questions to ask in the event of a massive drop in traffic.

Sample Event: OMG! Your monitoring system goes haywire! Traffic drops +20%! Why?!?!

Q1 – Is the data fully available? This is where maintaining a good relationship with ops team is crucial. Massive events require flexibility within the organization. If you don’t have an ops team to work with, you can utilize Google Analytics to double check. Drill into hourly reports within advanced segments.

Q2 – Who else is affected? Find the limits of the event. SEO affects everything and everything affects SEO. Communication is essential. This isn’t the time to send emails and then wait for responses! Keep your departments near by.

Q3 – Are there rumors of an algorithm update rumors? The best way to know: Read, read, read. Focus on trusted online forums.

Q4 – What was recently launched? Keep an event log. Sometimes, product launches a month back can be the cause of a sudden drop in traffic. At the same time, go bug engineers who may have launched something. Not every entail is written down. Watch for rollbacks that undo critical changes.

If nothing was recently launched, go back to Q3

Keep on reading! Remember -just because you find one issue doesn’t mean this is the only issue. Go back to the same forums and search news sites.

Proceed to Q5.

Q5 – What areas are affected? Segment in any way you can. KW grouping, KW length, traffic level, motive, page grouping, home, category, products, domain / site groupings, etc.

Return to Q3.

Any mentions around the web? No? Get back to work. And proceed to Q6.

Q6 – Did something break? Let’s assume everything has been white hat. Sometimes, broken or forgotten process can lead to a broken website that looks like a black hat SEO site. Ouch! Know what is fundamental to your sites SEO – backend function are easiest things to miss, worker transitions always miss certain processes. Go back to ops team to run through SEO checklist.

Did that? Good. Return to Q3.

Keep reading! Can you find a confirmation from around the web of an algorithm update? Yes? Finally!

So… now what?  Now’s time for data collection. Pull the sources mentioning the algo update together as you move to Q7.

Q7 – Who is talking? Recognize the regulars. Skip the broken track records. Always read the important people, even if its just one sentence from them. Conversely, scrutinize the strangers – read long commentators. Short comments are typically not worth it. Repeat the mantra, “Jerks will be jerks.” Push past annoyances and listen to what people are saying.

Q8 – What sites are dropping? Your ranking data shows the severity of impact. Take a look at competitors ranking data- this is essential! Seeing who survives can help provide answers about ago updates.

Q9 – What are the theories? Think like a black hat (did we just say that?). Think about what is going on, where the series fit.

“Hate content farms? Wait for the new click farms!” -Micah

Q10 – What theories fit? Find out everything you can – work your business connections, read blogs for in-depth analysis. Jot down likely possibilities, make sure you have enough data. When you’re collecting data, make sure you’re collecting enough. Two sites do not = enough data. Throw in a third, and suddenly data doesn’t quite look right…

Q 11 – What can we do to recover? Build for the user, think like a search engine, learn to love statistics – understand how changes were made. A/B test. Everything. Multiple times. Test across subdomains, page types, categories.

With that, Micah wrapped up, and turned it over for a little Q&A. That’s all aimClear captured, and we hope it whet your appetite for more #SMX East 2011 coverage to come Stay tuned.

photo credit: yoyolabellut

Google’s recent modification of how link data is categorized in Webmaster Tools had observant SEO practitioners and clients asking interesting questions. If you’re wondering if it’s time to put the brakes on rolling up your subdomains as an SEO tactic because of this Google change, this post has important information.

To be clear, though Big “G” tossed around twenty-five cent words like “reclassification,” there is now confirmation that the update changed nothing algorithmically and only affects how Google displays existing link data in Webmaster tools.

Google is now displaying subdomain data in the “internal links” section instead of the previous “links to your site” section in Webmaster tools. This is a subtle change webmasters have been asking about for years.

There are currently no additional user-controls/options/functions that didn’t exist before. After the Reorganization announcement, nobody published observations noting changes in the SERPs.  Still, there was a lot of reckless speculation as to whether an algorithmic shift had actually taken place in regards to subdomains. It did not.

Below are some additional resources if you’re interested in the greater discussion:

• New: Google Classifies Subdomains As Internal Links Within Webmaster Tools
• Google Redefines External, Internal Links in Webmaster Tools
• Google Classifies Subdomains As Part Of The Main Domain Now
• Google Changes Classification of External and Internal Links

Again, this only a cosmetic change to how subdomain links are counted in Google Webmaster Tools and there is no change to how links pass PageRank. This is not a solution/substitute/alternative method for what SEO pros try to achieve by consolidating Subdomains as part of classic SEO strategy.

photo credit: JD Hancock

AdWords Keyword Tool may be viable again for SEO. The debilitating short-tail-only problems seem to have been fixed. Long live SEO!

On October 7th 2010, we published a post in aimClear Blog entitled, “R.I.P. Google Keyword Tool. Long Live SEO!” Baris Gultekin, Group Product Manager, Google AdWords, Google, Inc. had just dropped a big stink bomb at #SMX East, confirming what many of us had already figured out.  The omnipresent AdWords Keyword Tool had changed and only was returning keywords Google deemed “commercial.”

We understood the meaning. Modified Broad Match, AdWords newest match type, may have  rendered the need for exhaustive long tail PPC research less important. The pervasive search suggest box was herding users like cats to dumbed down inventory.   Arguably PPC-only marketers didn’t need to see the long tail as specifically any more.  At the time, the most respected PPC trainers in the world were quietly preaching a de-emphasis on intensive keyword focus. Still, a lot of professional search marketers, PPC and SEO alike, were pretty bummed out at the KW tool changes.

Google Listened
Wednesday, December 08, after weeks of complaining from accomplished users and bloggers, Google’s Inside AdWords blog, published, “The Keyword Tool – when you talk, we listen.”  This’s official Google blog for news, information and tips on AdWords, offered,  “We want to thank you for all the feedback you’ve given us on the Keyword Tool.” “The first thing you told us is that you want more keywords that are better targeted to your account and searches, and we’ve made improvements in this area.”

Upon a review of changes, made to Adwords Keyword Tool earlier this month, we’re happy to report that the most dumbass problems seem to have been fixed, making AdWord KW Tool a viable SEO go-to utility once again.

They’ve seemed to have removed the lame-sauce, making the tool serious once once,  by adding depth back into the tool.  Now marketers have access to a relatively deep slice of Google’s mid and long tail search inventory.  Thanks for listening Google. Good decision.

Back in October, the newly modified KW tool only returned 12 semantic permutations worldwide of “Facebook,” logged in, at phrase, broad and exact match. You heard it right…the entire world.

October 7th, 2010

Now using the same settings,  AdWords KW tool yields over 800 keywords in the United States alone, with plenty of search frequency to spare. Whew, that’s a relief.

December 21, 2010

There were a few other improvements announced in the December 08 Inside AdWords “we listen and care” post.  Google added stars to keywords and a useful “View as text button.” These tweaks are nice but not nearly as significant as Google’s sensitivity to negative buzz, responding and dialing the mid and longer-tails back in.

It seems Google even has Feedback form for marketers wanting to contribute to the AdWords Keyword Research Tool.  I plan on using it. Thanks Google. It’s good listening to customers, given the incredible gobs of money we spend on AdWords.  The benefit to SEO is an added bonus, and we’ll take it.  Thank you for listening Baris.

Of course AdWords KW tool is only one of many sources SEOs shold use to locate choice keywords.  Stil it’s nice, once again, to have deeper insight into Google’s search inventory. Long live SEO.

photo credit: jaci XIII

Data is starting to roll in on the effects of Google’s elegant UI/SERPs adaptation Google Instant. The concept of SERPs that configure as users type is not new, but it appears big G’ has laid claim to mass paradigm busting.  Marketing chatter ranges from ridiculously hyperbolic to ho-hum with good reason. Instant instantly appoints already-dominant brands’ godly brand-status & likely makes growing brand awareness more expensive for everyone else.

Even aside from Instant’s potential to affect traffic, just think of the incredible subliminal branding that takes place as users type there searches out. Whether a user is searching for “basketball,” “botany” or “blintzes,” the keyword “Best Buy” flashes past with nary a flicker. Google has anointed Best Buy’s marketing manager Pope of the “b” SERPs. Read on for more SERP samples that show it’s no easy task to decode Google Instant’s black box mystical brand signals…

Personalized Suggest
Keep in mind that Google’s suggestions and pre-type predictions are, at minimum,  IP (geographical) sensitive and subject to other personalized context for individual users. We’ve studied suggestions from numerous IP addresses from around America, accessed from various users’ browsers, with and without gathered web history, clean OS/Browser installation from new IP addresses and logged both and out of Google services.  The Google Suggest REST API, the best insight as to suggestions Google is willing to pony up to Webmasters, does not depersonalize by any URL variable and is also IP sensitive. Gee, thanks Google.

That said, some suggestions, by their very semantic nature, are less personalized than others.  The keyword “low quality” is obviously not as commonly associated with geo-specific queries.  Here’s a look at the GoogleSuggest API.

The word “first” is often queried with geographic clarifying words. Note that “First Avenue” is a nightclub, just miles from downtown St. Paul and FirstMark Services is [considered by Google to be] a brand in Nebraska.

If your website is lost to Google (aka “The Man”), not just buried in the SERPs, it may have violated Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) by singular or multiple violations. This isn’t a mistake, so be prepared to get on your knees, confess your crimes, wait for the Googlers to flip the switch back on and release you from spammers’ prison.

In the Post Mortem: Site Forensics Session at Search Engine Strategies, New York Michael Stebbins, CEO and Founder of Market Motive and Rand Fishkin, you know, CEO of SEOmoz, divulged the how to tell if your site has been banned or penalized and the subsequent hoops one must jump through to regain Google’s trust.

Starting the session, moderator Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer at ClearSaleing introduced the speakers and handed over the podium to Stebbins. “First things first, find out if you are really banned or just penalized.”

How to Know For Certain:

• Google Webmaster tools. (Google will straight-up tell you if you are)
• Or site search query
  • Site:HatsOfMeat.com
  • If you see results, it’s NOT banned (Whew )

That said, one should be aware of what will piss off the Giant. Stebbins grouped the sins into three categories, Venial (Forgivable), Regular Sins (Not good, but wont get you banned, just penalized) and Mortal Sins, (You’re not going to like where this leads, believe it).

Venial Sin, Removed by a Technical Mistake

• ie Robots.txt moved from staging server to live server
• No sweat & easy to fix

Sin Myth: Repeated Requests to Google

• NOT reason for website removal
• Typically confused with getting services blocked to a client

Sin 1: Linking to Bad Neighborhoods

• Red flag to Google
• Imply reciprocal links and/or agreements that are not natural representation of organic and “genuine” relevance.

Sin 2: Keeping Bad Company

• Are you sharing server IP addresses with bad sites? (What do you mean “you don’t know?!)
• Find Out ASAP!
  • Who’s on my web server?
  • Have any of those sites been banned
  • IP addresses are seen as a common ownership sign
  • My IP Neighbors or Link Vendor
  • Any sites with zero pages? (Pssst! that’s  not good)
    • If there are only a few, search by hand
    • Many, write a small script

Solution: Move the site to a dedicated server.

Sin 3: Using Other People’s Content

• First page wins, the rest are “less relevant”
• You don’t usually get pulled for JUST this, but it exacerbates the other sins

MORTAL SIN 1: Fake Popularity

• >80% links are to (or from) your other sites!
• Same ownership is detected using:
  • Server class C IP address (90% certainty)
  • AdSense ID (90% certain, if the checks are all going to the same dude… The Man can connect the dots…)
  • Site registration information (90% certain when manual)

MORTAL SIN 2: Selling Naked Links

• Links that pass juice
• Usually results in penalty but CAN result in removal
• Exacerbated by other sins… if caught
• Hard to detect: Sites can fly under the radar
  • Unless ratted out
  • “buy text links” or other like phrases on site (well, that’s just plain dumb)
  • Google will take away your power ie devaluation from PR8 to PR3 to try and get you in line for this sin.

MORTAL SIN3: Fake Relevance

• Robots are BLIND & DEAF
  • It’s OK to present different content to bots than users (as long as the intent is not to rank)
  • Hiding text
  • Hiding links
  • Hiding auto redirects
  • Doorway pages

How To Get Re-Included

• If your site has committed 3 mortal sins… move on, darlin’ this ship has not only sailed, it SUNK. Invest elsewhere.
• 2 mortal sins, worth a try…
  • Fix problems
  • Prepare to confess your sins… IN DETAIL
  • Submit site for reconsideration along with the mea culpa
  • If multiple sites with similar template or IP address
    • Get ONE re-included, then reset (Kind of Sophie’s Choice here, I know, it’s hard)
    • Tell them why you love your site, why you need it to be saved, why it’s relevant
    • Admit what you did wrong in the past tense
    • Show what you are doing right now that you know better

Stebbins closed with a good rule of thumb: “Follow the money. Search Engines only work if their algorithm produces relevant results with genuine popularity. Genuine relevance and popularity ensures you are a good partner for Google.”

While transitioning between presentation Goldberg asked: “If your competitor is committing these sins, can you rat them out?” (Muhahaha!)

Fishkin answered: “Reporting spam has little to no effect (especially recently). But, if there are multiple egregious sins, send it through webmaster tools & create publicity around it, like SEO blogs. Bring it to the attention of people in those spheres and the word will get around .”

And with that Fishkin took the podium with his deck entitled: Bans & Penalties: Knowing When to Hold ‘Em, When to Fold ‘Em and How to Circumvent Google Penalties

First things first, confirm you’ve been banned/penalized through the methods Stebbins discussed.

Ok, so you are banned/penalized. *sob* What now?!

Our instincts are either fight or flight, Fishkin outlines what the conditions are for holding your own and standing your ground, or running away to a new domain with your tail between your legs.

Conditions for a Fight: (Let’s get ready to RUMBLE!)

• Respected/prominent/growing brand (especially if it’s your one and only brand)

• Single site (or maybe 2 or 3…)

• If you own many sites, the Engine has a perception that you’re not normal = red flag (Who needs 237 sites? No one.)

• Low number of offenses

• First time offender, fix it, apologize and learn from the paddling Google gave you (‘Cause the second time around isn’t going to be as easy).

• Connections to the Man and the people who work for him (aka Googlers)

• Face to face interactions can really help (even on the interwebnets!)

When to Fly

• Somewhat-easy-to-reporduce Site
• Low Brand Value
• Low Quality/Quantity of links
• Multi-strike offender
• You have the experience to do(know) better next time.

But…

Get Black Hat Results With White Hat Tactics

Legal ways to do stuff you’ve been penalized for:

• Lots of targeted anchor text quick – link bait/link magnets! (make industry friends QUICK)

• Embedded Content (badges & widgets) – Make embeded content easy to obtain & have it link back to your site. (GIVE it away!)

• Branding and product naming – consult Google’s keyword tool before naming/branding

• Content/Technology Licensing – assuming you have great content to license out…

• Showing Different Content to Engines versus users (it’s OK as long as the intent is not to manipulate) Cookies/session IDs & Logged-In Users

• Selling Links (*nudge, nudge. wink, wink*) – Sell access to a link-likely audience (Mashable, techCrunch, StumpleUpon, Techmeme etc)

• Redirect “Live Link” conversations to Event Sponsorships/Promotions/Partnerships

“we don’t sell links because it’s against Google’s TOS, BUT… we can have you sponsor a Schmoozefest we’re hosting”

• Sell “Reviews” of Sites/Products/Services For Potential Inclusion; Not “Links” ie Best of the Web (you’re buying the review).

There you have it, fellas and dames, now have some good clean, legal fun.

photo credit: jdnx

I had a near out of body-real-time SMS/search/tweet experience last night interacting with our attorney, Laura.  (No, the picture’s not Laura.)  She’s in Manhattan to attend the Social Media Risks and Rewards legal conference, and pinged me to quick-search for information about a ruckus she was observing outside the famed Waldorf Astoria.

Our innocent little text exchange and my ensuing searches (illustrated later in this article) make it entirely clear there’s a radical new type of query intent (what users’ are looking for): situational. It turns out Google’s not adept at some situational searches which, to some minds,  leaves them vulnerable to services like Twitter in a substantial segment of emerging search inventory.

Situational searches happen when users seek information about transient or faster moving events, not necessarily the most important happenings in the world-by-the-numbers, but very important to someone.  For instance a situational search is when a user wants to know why an unexpected motorcade is driving through town or a street corner crowd gathered.  An explosion on the horizon, before news outlets and search engines grab hold of the buzz, also qualifies as situational.

Situational searches can be associated with micro demographics or massive constituencies.  This evolving query type surrounds users who want to know now, in the moment, about something happening and faster than last-gen search engines index human activity.

Query Intent Background
Research-types dissemble categories of query-intent by user’s purpose. The classic subdivision breaks out as follows: a) navigational (searcher looking for specific site) b) Informational (research oriented) c) Transactional (ready to do something like buy). So goes traditional thinking.

The new kid on the block, “situational,” wasn’t possible in previous generations of search. The reason why is simple. There were few mainstream real-time platforms or users who were searchable.  Now there’s Twitter, Facebook, Google’s last few minutes-index, etc… There should be little doubt that Twitter does situational best. They have the real-time user base, conditioned to share in-the-moment events. Google does not have similarly conditioned users.

Now let’s get back to the text exchange with Laura, which clarifies situational searches beautifully. For TwitterSearch naysayers, we hope this anecdote, regarding Twitter and situational searches, sheds light regarding the value of such services and illustrates Google’s blind spot.

TEXT MESSAGES

L (Laura from New York): “See who is at Waldorf Astoria tonight, major security. Machine guns.”

M (Marty in Duluth): “Hold on.”

L: “Looked like secret service earlier.”

M “Hold on, searching…brb [be right back]”

I Spring Into Action!
First I scanned the top of unpersonalized Google search engine results pages  (SERPs) for “Waldorf Astoria.” There was nothing there to help me figure out why there might secret service types outside now.

The rest of the page yielded no clues.

I then tried Google’s “Indexed in Last 10 Minutes” feature to see if there was anything newly indexed…nothing.

…checked out Bing: Nada, nothing, zilch…

I was thinking maybe Facebook would yield real-time fruit. Nope!

However, there are a bunch of dudes named Waldorf Astoria (hmmm)

Then it came to me, TWITTER! A quick Twitter search…

…SCORE! It turns out Matt Damon was shooting a movie at the Waldorf Astoria last night. Insiders were tweeting about it.  Twitter was the search engine to solve my situational search.

RESUME TEXT MESSAGES

M: Waldorf is a Matt Damon movie set now

L: Shut up

M: (text Twitter search string to Laura’s Blackberry)

L: [He] “hasn’t shown up yet”

M: “Do you believe in Twitter now?”

L: “F U”

L: “Facebooked it ”

M: “Bye 4 now”

L: “Later”

The Morning After
I was curious to see how mainstream SERPs looked the next morning. Now that it was clear that the event was about “Waldorf Astoria Matt Damon,” I wanted to search Google again.

There was some previously indexed content as well as an index tweet from the night before.  The older content was probably there the evening before. There was just no possible way we could have known that the event was about Matt Damon.

How about GoogleNews, searching for “Matt Damon?” After all, this is what Matt’s working on… now… today. Nothing.

How about Yahoo!? Was there anything indexed the morning after?

Even Yahoo, show-biz skank of mainstream search engines, could not associate Matt Damon with the Waldorf shoot.

Situational searches are the new query-intent type.  They occur when users want to find out about new and/or rapidly moving situations. Google and other traditional search engines can’t generate this real-time feed because, unlike Twitter & Facebook, Google has never socialized users successfully.  The lack of engaged real-time user pool is a serious barrier to entry. Sure Google can index Twitter but the result is kind of lame. We’ll get more into that in future posts.

Also there are hybrid intents, no doubt. For instance those searching for  Dell Computer sweat-tweet in-the-moment 1-computer deals are doing “transactional situation searches.”

For any TwitterSearch naysayers, we hope a heightened understanding of situational search lends perspective on the value of such micro-blogging services, as they exist now and in the future.